What's Nature Got To Do With It? A Situated Historical Perspective on Socio‐natural Commodities

Abstract

Nature(s) have been commodified since the early days of capitalism, but through processes and socio-natural relationships mediated by their times, histories and localities. While the conditions under which nature's commodities are being trademarked today may be new, their potential for commodification is not. Commodifications of nature should not come as a surprise to environmental social scientists and activists. In this article, I argue that commodification of ‘nature's products, places and processes’ produces new sorts of socio-natures. Situated histories of rubber are particularly relevant because, like carbon, ecosystem services and other recently commodified natures, rubber sits comfortably on the line between a fictitious commodity and a commodity produced explicitly for market: the latex alone has almost no use value, and to give it any exchange value, it requires processing. Yet analytically, it is still considered a ‘natural commodity’, different from ‘synthetic rubber’ and other tradable tree latexes in qualities and socio-natural characteristics. However, it is the social relations constituting rubber's production and trade in various rainforest and agro-forestry environments that have given it a positive or negative connotation, rather than its natural properties or the ecological contexts within which it has been produced. By situating rubber in three of its globally important temporal and spatial contexts, I show how it has been subjected to fairy-tale-like stories that masked and naturalized its commodity lives of the moment. Understanding how history is told or remains untold is thus an essential part of the politics of knowledge production, but also of human experience and mobilization for change. It should be part of any political ecology analysis.

Silencing Agency in Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) by Essentializing a Neoliberal ‘Monster’ Into Being: A Response to Fletcher & Büscher's ‘PES Conceit’

“…We argue that grand generalizations of PES -often pivoting around a 'Wunderian' PES ontology (Wunder, 2005(Wunder, , 2015 underpinned by neoliberal philosophy -all too often overlook alternative relationalities that actors mobilize to make sense of PES. A 'PES conceit' approach risks imbuing and dismissing this complexity through a wholesale relegation of PES as hegemonic neoliberalism, thereby obscuring the situational history, practice and scale of the processes involved (Barnett, 2005;Larner, 2003;Peluso, 2012), and silencing the agency of the related actors. Paradoxically, this position risks keeping the 'neoliberal monster' alive -the very one we try to escape from.…”

Making a Market for Sustainability: The Commodification of Certified Palm Oil

“…One criticism of the neoliberal ecologies literature is that there is an excessive focus on the creation and novelty of neoliberal nature and not enough about the 'how' of recurrent commodification (Peluso 2012). Not wanting to reproduce this here, the penultimate section of the paper questions the immutability of sustainability certificates as an ecological commodity.…”

“…The common thread in each case has been the pursuit of environmental ends by deepening capitalist relations and creating a scarcity of "allowable natural destruction" (Smith 2007: 20). Thus, conservation strategy has gone from protecting endangered species and setting aside nature reserves, to greening production and monetising ecology (Peluso 2012).…”

“…Moreover, fictitious commodification is not a conclusive act. Successive waves of commodity production require re-legitimation and a set of stories that explains the treatment of socio-natural commodities for their time (Peluso 2012).…”

Kastom, property and ideology

“…In this literature, land is grabbed not only by high-wealth individuals but also by foreign governments demanding a supply of cheap food crops or arable land on which to grow biofuels and non-food agricultural crops (Cotula et al 2008Zoomers 2010). Development of nature reserves and conversation areas form another basis for largescale land transformation (Peluso and Lund 2011;Peluso 2012). The suggested overall trend from land grabbing is a shift in landownership from indigenous people to foreigners (Zoomers 2010: 440).…”